Misérables, Les. Victor Hugo's most popular novel, published 1862, about the socially and spiritually damned. Begun in 1845 after extensive research on problems of poverty, penal reform, and capital punishment, the writing of the manuscript, originally called Les Misères, was interrupted by the Revolution of 1848 and picked up again in 1860.
The action begins on the eve of Waterloo in 1815 when an escaped convict, Jean Valjean, hardened by being imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's family, now steals from a kindly bishop who has given him shelter. We follow the hero, whose name implies ‘Everyman’, through the various stages of his moral regeneration, rendered perilous and exciting by the relentless pursuit of Javert, an intransigent agent of the law. Features of the plot recall the popular feuilleton literature of Sue's Les Mystères de Paris. The action moves abruptly from 1815 to 1817 when Jean Valjean, who now calls himself Monsieur Madeleine, has become a wealthy and respectable bourgeois. After a battle of conscience, he reveals his former identity and returns to prison to save the life of a derelict wrongly accused of being Jean Valjean. Freedom of choice is underlined when he escapes arrest temporarily to promise the dying prostitute, Fantine, that he will care for her child, Cosette. He develops a passionate paternal attachment to Cosette, with whom he lives in isolation from society, but possessiveness gives way to self-sacrifice when he saves the life of her fiancé, Marius, by carrying him through the sewers of Paris.
The novel abounds with memorable characters: Gavroche, the witty and heroic street urchin who dies on the barricades during the Revolution of 1830, the evil Thénardiers who abuses Cosette, and pre- Haussmann Paris in all its mystery and diversity. The narrative is interrupted by long digressions of historical and sociological interest: a flashback to Waterloo, a critique of the pathology of convent life, a disquisition on slang, a visionary description of the Paris sewers. This incomparably rich story about the coming into being of a free individual ends with Jean Valjean's return to anonymity, as nature effaces his name from his tombstone. Thus, the social and political allegory takes on the familiar pattern of Hugo's metaphysical view of history as a force that continues its path beyond human memory.
[Suzanne Nash]
